Politics makes strange bedfellows. Wars make even stranger ones. Today, George Bush sat in Red Square with Vladimir Putin and various world leaders to celebrate the victory over Nazism. The White House website promotes Bush's trip under a banner stating "Celebrating Freedom and Democracy." In reference to World War II, we can make that boast. Can the nation Bush celebrates in today do the same?

The Soviet Union sacrificed millions of men to defeat the Nazis, but not a single one to liberate Europe. While we went home after the war, the Soviet Union didn't. They used the war to incorporate Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union, to install puppet regimes by bayonet point in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and points beyond, and to make unsuccessful attempts to take over Finland, Greece, and other sovereign nations. Had Hitler not turned on his erstwhile ally Stalin in Operation Barbarossa--who knows?--a bunch of cartoonish fanatics in military garb might be celebrating victory with the Russians today. The people of Eastern Europe traded one oppressor for another. Did it matter all that much to them that one bore a swastika insignia while the other bore a sickle and hammer? In times of war, it's often necessary to align with unsavory individuals to defeat a common enemy. Recognizing this doesn't compel us to forget just what it meant when the U.S. and Britain liberated a nation from the Nazis, and what it meant when the Soviet Union "liberated" a nation from the Nazis.

Yeah, I thought it was strange when I heard on the radio a celebration of the Soviets' victory of "freedom over tyranny." Unfortunately, those millions of Russian men gave their lives for tyranny over tyranny.

Spot-on points. On the USSR's imperial reach, see also Whittaker Chambers' article, "Ghosts on the Roof" where he sizes up the 1945 Yalta Conference in which the US and UK ceded Eastern European influence to the USSR by telling it from the haunting perspective of the assassinated Tsar and his family.

I FEEL THAT THE USSR WAS BAD!

=P